Saturday, September 05, 2009

Ward Churchill and Valdas Anelauskas

"I wish to extend my thanks...to Ward Churchill who helped substantially with the Native American section [of my book America as It Is.]"--Valdas Anelauskas, author of America as It Is, page vi.

In progress...

This is a picture of a crackpot Lithuanian anti-Semite named Valdas Anelauskas who came to America in the last years of Soviet power and hooked up with the charlatan "scholar" Ward Churchill. Soviet anti-Semites style themselves as "anti-Zionists," but they really are nothing but old-fashioned anti-Semites.For a Lithuanian nationalist, Anelauskas sure spends a lot of time criticizing other cultures instead of uplifting his own. Did he play any role in the main dissident, samizdat (self-published) Lithuanian publication, The Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania?

Anti-Semitism is prevalent in today's Russia and was prevalent in the former U.S.S.R. There were anti-Semites in the general population, in the Communist Party, and particularly in the KGB, which--like the Czarist Okhrana--exploited and fanned this popular prejudice to manipulate public opinion.

For example, the KGB-controlled media called Andrei Sakharov's wife "The Jewess Bonner" and blamed her husband's dissident activities on his Jewish wife. In the closing years of the U.S.S.R., Muscovites watched with amazement as young anti-Semitic thugs called "Lubers"/любера (after the name of their Moscow suburb Lyubertsy/Люберцы ), who had organized under the cover of sports clubs, marched in NAZI uniforms on Hitler's birthday. The KGB didn't interfere with them.

Valdas Anelauskas emigrated to the United States and within a few years was writing that America was no different than the former U.S.S.R. People can read about Valdas Anelauskas on the Internet and see him speak on Youtube.

According to the blog Screw Loose Change (6-9-09), Anelauskas was invited to address the Portland Truth Alliance. These are a branch of the wacky "9-11 Truthers" who believe that the U.S. Government was behind 9-11.

In 1999, Anelauskas published a controversial book with a so-called "independent publisher" titled America as It Is. The book was given rave reviews by Crescent, which purports to be "a Newsmagazine of the Islamic Movement":

Valdas Anelauskas, a former Soviet dissident and journalist from Lithuania, was also taken in by American propaganda about freedom, glory and instant riches, at least for a while. In this massive book, meticulously researched and documented, he peels off the layers of propaganda to expose America for what it is. In thirteen chapters, he focuses on such issues as moneyed politics, the state of education, crime and poverty, the non-functional judicial system, the burgeoning prison population and America's role as a global cop and villain. In doing so, he exposes the dark side of life in America which, he says, he never imagined existed when he was in the former Soviet Union. The only time he heard it mentioned was in Soviet propaganda broadcasts although these were so crude that most people, including himself, simply dismissed them. Because he was a human rights activist and a Lithuanian nationalist struggling against Soviet hegemony, he was psychologically resistant to Soviet propaganda and vulnerable to western propaganda. It was only after coming face to face with the harsh reality of life in America that he realized how misinformed he was, despite earlier warning signs. Of his first encounter with a staff-member from the American Tolstoy Foundation in Vienna, the organization that "helped" high-profile dissidents to migrate to the U.S., he writes: "I will always remember how somebody from the Tolstoy Foundation's staff in Vienna put it: I had the 'choice' between spending the night on a park bench and going to America" (p.18). He regrets that he fell into the trap, but then as a dissident, he says, he was both physically and mentally exhausted at the time and did not think carefully through the choice being offered.This was one of the many mistakes he admits he has made. Anelauskas realized long after coming to the U.S. that the RFE/RL programmes run by the CIA, as well as Voice of America, were hugely sophisticated in their propaganda and had far greater impact on making people believe that the Soviet system was absolutely evil and that the U.S. was the best place on earth. With hindsight, he realizes that much of what these stations beamed to the outside world had little relation to reality.

I kind of doubt that Anelauskas' anti-Semitism found a warm reception at RFE/RL. It seems that the point of the Crescent article is to warn Muslims not to listen to RFE/RL. Crescent closes by advising that the "meticulously researched and documented" America as It Is "should be compulsory reading, especially for those Muslims who are mesmerized by American propaganda":

[Anelauskas'] well-documented book should be compulsory reading, especially for those Muslims who are mesmerized by American propaganda, so that they see the real face of America beyond the glittering facade. America's lure is great but its reality is horrible.

As one commentator wryly put it, even if you win the rat race -- it is still a race for rats.

Anelauskas' "meticulously researched and documented" book was not "well-documented" at all, because his "authority" on the history of American Indians was the discredited ex-professor, fabricator, and KGB-mouthpiece"Cherokee historian Ward Churchill" (America as It Is, p. 396).

"Valdas Anelauskas' Discovering America As It Is illuminates the dark corners of U.S. history and current events, and draws all the right conclusions. If just one-in-ten lifelong Americans had ever bothered themselves to learn as much about their country as has this recent Lithuanian immigrant, the horrors he writes about would never have existed. This is must reading for the entire population."Ward Churchillactivist and author of A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present

Anelauskas notes in the "Acknowledgements" (vi) of America as It Is:

I wish to extend my thanks to my editor, Diana G. Collier, to Ward Churchill who helped substantially with the Native American section, to Sam Henderson for his consultation on the African section, and to Dr. Y.N.Kly, who has kindly provided a fitting introduction to this book.

I also wish to acknowledge the assistance of two independent scholars, Chros Brady and Milton Takei who helped me in the initial stages of writing - and my numerous European friends and colleagues whose opinions and questions actually led me to the idea of writing such a book.

On page 396 of America as It Is, Anelauskas writes:

American Indians

The crime of genocide is usually understood in the United States as being almost exclusively associated with the drive of Nazi Germany to exterminate the Jews. Yet the Nazi holocaust encompassed a much broader range of targets —Gypsies, for example, and entire Slavic populations—and its perpetrators were originally inspired by genocidal policies directed against the native people of America. (6) As Cherokee historian Ward Churchill has noted:

Hitler's notion of how to obtain "living space"—the "clearing of inferior stock" from their land base in order that vacated areas might be settled by ethnic Germans—followed closely such U.S. precedents as the 1830 Indian Removal Act and subsequent military campaigns against the indigenous nations of America. (8) As Churchill observes, "Even the Nazi tactic of concentrating 'undesirables' prior to their forced 'relocation or reduction' was drawn from actual U.S. examples, including internment of the Cherokees and other 'Civilized tribes' during the 1830s, before the devastatingly lethal Trail of Tears was forced upon them, and the comparable experience of the Navajo people at the Bosque Redondo during the period 1864-68. (9)

Churchill is cited as the source for footnotes 7 and 9:

7. Ward Churchill, "The Earth Is Our Mother:" Struggles for American Indian Land and Liberation in the Contemporary United States, in M. Annette Jaimes, ed., The State of Native America; Genocide, Colonization and Resistance ( Boston: South End Press, 1992) p. 145.

9. Churchill, supra endnote 7, p. 145. For fuller and more detailed explorations of the practical and theoretical linkages between Lebensraumpolitik and Manifest Destiny, see the relevant sections of Ward Churchill 's A Little matter of Genocide:Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present ( San Fransisco: City Lights, 1997). Also see Frank Parella's MA thesis, Lebensraum and Manifest Destiny: A Comparative Study in the Justification of Expansionism ( Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University School of International Affairs, 1950); Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: the Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).

In 1763, Lord Jeffrey Amherst, commander of British forces in the Ohio river valley, ordered items infected with small pox to be distributed among native peoples in the region so that, as he put it in writing, "we might extirpate this [execrable] race." The same method was employed by the U.S. Army against the Mandans on the upper Missouri River in 1836, by private citizens against the Indians of northern California during the 1850s, and probably elsewhere. See Churchill, supra endnote 9, pp. 15157. [Cited from America as It Is. Questia.com]

A blogger named Soliton [Hat Tip commenter Amos at Pirate Ballerina] reported on February 28, 2oo5, that Churchill seems to have deliberately put another writer's words in Adolf Hitler's mouth (I have lightly corrected some typos and will gradually be verifying Soliton's quotes, adding some links and/or page numbers.)

Ward Churchill will never be fired for making inflammatory statements, falsely claiming Native American ancestry, or for deliberate lies in his speeches and essays. The University can, and should however, terminate the professor for academic fraud.

In his Struggle for the Land: Indigenous Resistance to Genocide and Expropriation in Contemporary North America, after claiming, “it is probable that more than a quarter-million Indians perished as a direct result of U.S. extermination campaigns.” he to states, “Admiring its effectiveness, barely fifty years later, Adolf Hitler would explicitly anchor his concept of lebensraumpolitik (“politics of living space”) directly upon U.S. practices against American Indians. 58” As support for this statement, Professor Churchill provides a long passage from Mein Kampf that makes no mention of U.S. practices against American Indians and then states:

“…In Hitler’s Secret Book (New York, 1961, pp. 44-8) he made it even more clear that, “Neither Spain nor Britain should be models of German expansion, but the Nordics of North America, who had ruthlessly pushed aside an inferior race to win for themselves soil and territory for the future.”

This is Ward Churchill’s source for the lebensraumpolitik quote. Because the reference follows a direct quote of Hitler, and cites a book written by Hitler as his source, the “he” must refer to Hitler himself. In fact, Churchill has stated that Hitler is the source of this quote in the Derek Jensen Interview (below). The quote is not from Mein Kampf, or Hitler’s Secret Book. It is not even a quote of Hitler’s. The sentence cited is from Hitler’s War Aims by Norman Rich. It is not a quote of someone else, but Rich’s own thesis of what Hitler’s war aims were. It should have been obvious to Churchill that Rich was not quoting Hitler from the passage’s context, because the sentence was not in quotation marks, and that Rich had already stated the same thesis in the introduction nine pages earlier in different words, “…His model was not that of his Habsburg Rulers, with their indiscriminant annexation of peoples of different races and religions but that of the Nordics of North America, who had ruthlessly swept aside a lesser race to insure their ethnic survival.” Rich cites as one of his sources as Hitler’s Secret Book pp. 44-8. This is apparently why Churchill uses the same cite. Please note that it is obvious from the fact that Rich’s cite covers four pages that it covered a sizeable passage and not the single sentence as suggested by Churchill. This suggests that Churchill may have plagiarized Rich’s cite.

Derrick Jensen: You're the first person I've seen make the explicit connection between Manifest Destiny and the lebensraum policy of the Third Reich.

Ward Churchill: Actually, the first person I'm aware of to make that connection was Adolf Hitler. He stated clearly in Mein Kampf that he did not take any of the old empires of Europe as the model for what he saw as the destiny of the German people. Rather, he took the Nordic population, as he called it, of North America, who had had the "strength of will" to exterminate an "inferior" people and put their land to its own use, making of itself in fairly short order a continental power capable of projecting a global influence on the course of events.

[Blogger Soliton explains] Although he cites Mein Kampf as his source, he is clearly referencing the Norman Rich quote and attributing it to Hitler. In another interview, he uses a different formulation:

Ward Churchill: Hitler took note of Native Americans, indigenous people of the Americas, specifically within the area of the U.S. and Canada. He used the treatment of native people, the policies and processes that were imposed upon them, as a model for what he articulated as being Lebensraumpolitik, the politics of living space. In essence, Hitler took the notion of a drive from east to west, clearing the land as the invading population went and resettling it with Anglo-Saxon stock, primarily, as a model by which he drove from west to east into Russia, displacing, relocating, dramatically shifting or liquidating populations to clear the land and replace it with what he called "superior breeding stock," meaning Germanic peoples. It was essentially the same process, and he was very conscious of the fact that he was basing his policies in the prior experience of the Anglo-American population, or Nordic population, as he called it, in the area north of the Rio Grande River.”

[Blogger Soliton explains] Hitler does not use “Nordic population of North America” or “Nordics of North America” in Mein Kampf or Hitler’s Secret Book. The passages above are obviously referring to the deliberately misattributed Norman Rich quote.

Why would Ward Churchill deliberately place Norman Rich’s words in Hitler’s mouth? He misattributes the Rich quote for the same reason that he created the fictitious 1837 deliberate infection with smallpox of the Mandans, as exposed by Professor Thomas Brown of Lamar University, to support his thesis that their was a deliberate policy of genocide by the U.S Government directed toward Native Americans that resulted in a holocaust. The fact that as many as ninety percent of Native American mortality was the result of the unintended spread of communicable disease did not fit Churchill’s model, so he invents the infected blanket story to implicate the U. S. Government. A verifiable 1763 case of infected blankets being given to Native Americans would not serve because it predates the birth of the United States and it did not result in an outbreak of smallpox. By attributing the Rich quote to Hitler, Churchill gives his thesis credibility. If Hitler, the father of the real Holocaust, had “explicitly anchored” his concepts “explicitly” on “U.S. practices toward American Indians”, then the U.S. practices were themselves a holocaust.

The creation of false data to support a previously determined outcome is the basic definition of academic research fraud, and is a common reason for termination of even tenured professors.

2 Comments:

Well, I know Valdas Anelauskas from Russia. He never was a real dissident - joined the Lithuanian Freedom League just to get out of the country (the easiest way at the time to escape from the USSR - they allowed dissidents to leave). Has no education, no profession, with obvious mental problems - has been admited several times to a psychiatric hospital. All his rhetoric is nothing more than sore loser's whining.